Why accepting failure can be a foundation for success

Put your hands up if you’re OK with feeling vulnerable. And again, anyone who isn’t secretly afraid of failing. OK, so that exercise may have been more effective if we’d all been in a room together.

But the point is that there are very few people who are comfortable with the idea of vulnerability or failure, particularly at work. When we’re vulnerable, we feel exposed, raw even. When we fail, we feel defeated. Both states are embarrassing (perhaps misguidedly so), but no one likes to feel embarrassed.

So, we seek to hide our weaknesses and fail to acknowledge our failures, in the belief that it will make us better. But in the process, we lose a little humility and humanity, and that can have a knock-on effect on our ability to work productively.

Vulnerability can be good for business

Society dictates that to succeed we need to be strong. Not just strong, but invulnerable. To be able to hold ourselves and our businesses together, even under the most intense pressure. We’ve had this bred into us for decades, maybe even centuries.

But recent understanding has changed perceptions. We now all know that pretending to be strong and internalizing stress and fears can be incredibly bad for our mental health.

But despite this understanding, in 2021, four in five small business owners admitted to experiencing poor mental health. And this can lead to numerous repercussions, on both a personal and business level. From poor decision-making and lousy employee management to complete burnout.

But while masquerading behind a façade of invulnerability can be bad for business, admitting that we make mistakes and revealing our human underbelly holds the potential to improve our personal and business performance.

Because when we learn from our mistakes, they can make us stronger. And in understanding our own weaknesses, we can be more accepting of weakness in others – including our employees.

This doesn’t only make us nicer to work with – and there are many very real benefits to be garnered from that – but it also helps us to take some of the pressure off our own shoulders. And it all begins with confident vulnerability.

What is confident vulnerability?

Confident vulnerability is the art of accepting your weaknesses. Of understanding that you’re not good at everything, that you do make mistakes, that you’re sometimes wrong, and that you will probably fail – and maybe already have done – at some point in your life.

And that none of these things make you a lesser human being. You are no less worthy for being fallible, because we all are.

In fact, understanding these facts has the power to make you stronger because if you can be comfortable and confident in your weaknesses, work to your strengths – and allow others to work to theirs – it can improve productivity all round, and reduce your personal stress levels.

And this is important for various reasons. But primarily because it can help you to be happier and healthier, which is as good for your business and your employees as it is for your own personal wellbeing.

How to embrace confident vulnerability

Understanding the theory of something doesn’t always make it easy to put it into practice. And becoming comfortable with your limitations isn’t something that you can simply decide to do.

It takes small steps to make big changes; but the steps can be really easy to work into your everyday practices. It just takes a little thought and starts with admitting when you’re wrong.

We’ve all been guilty of an unwillingness, or even inability, to back down from time to time. Whether it’s been in an argument where we’ve staked out our hill to die on, a poor decision, an ill-thought-out remark, or something we did do but shouldn’t have, or should have done but didn’t.

Life (and particularly work) is full of these moments. But ignoring mistakes never makes them go away. By acknowledging when you are wrong, apologizing, and taking steps to rectify it where possible, you’re not only doing the right thing.

You’re showing that you’re not afraid to be human. You’re lifting the self-made pressure off your shoulders. And you’re freeing yourself to move on. Every apology holds this power. But for some reason, most of us struggle to make the correlation. In much the same way that we struggle to own our weaknesses.

How often do you use bluster and bravado to cover the fact that you’re not very good at something? Sure, you find your way through in the end. But if you’d simply asked for help in the first place, or just delegated, you could have made far better use of your time.

By openly acknowledging your limitations, you remove their power to harm you. You’re not going to be worried about ‘being caught out,’ because you’ve put your hands up and said, ‘hey, I need help.’ And that’s perfectly fine, because we all need help from time to time. You don’t know a single person who excels at everything.

So, why do you think that you are the exception? Once you not only understand but accept that you have areas of weakness, you can stop building your life around them. And you can help others in your team to do the same, thereby creating an open and honest working environment.

Another simple – possibly the simplest – step you can take is to remember to say thank you to others when it is needed. Showing gratitude is so far from being a weakness as to be its opposite.

Saying thank you, and acknowledging that someone helped you, makes that other person feel good. It shows a positive awareness of others, and it helps you to positively balance self-awareness.

By understanding our weaknesses and admitting our vulnerability, we give ourselves the opportunity to be human. We take away the stresses of hiding our fallibility. We’re more able to relax, and accept when things go wrong. We relieve ourselves of the burden of perfection.

And for managers, it also relieves that burden from teams and employees too. This makes for a happier, more productive work environment, greater loyalty from your team members, and more satisfaction for yourself.